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September 12, 2001 -- Mt. Shasta, CA (ZeppNews via APJP) -- I blame it on my sense of optimism.
When I logged on to the London Guardian website at 6:10 the morning everything changed, and saw under "Breaking Story" the headline, "Plane flies into side of World Trade Centre" the first thought that crossed my mind was that this was a replay of that sorry jackass who flew his Cessna into the side portico of the White House back in 1993. It sounded like it would make a fairly interesting story, so I put it up on my mailing list, with the apologetic that this was all the information I had.
I didn't think it was going to be a really big story. I really didn't.
I didn't get up to turn on the television, because I had a couple of other stories I wanted to look into first, including the one, not reported in American media, of the FBI shutting down over 200 Moslem-oriented websites here in the United States the day before.
An odd story, that.
I got a "Server not found" error, muttered, and went back to the main page of the Guardian. Nothing unusual there. Normally, I would just try the same page a second time, and it would display without problem.
But now the header had changed, and had said a second plane had struck the World Trade "Centre". I was still thinking in terms of Cessnas, but something was going on, so I went and turned on CNN. It had an ad for mattresses, so I concluded the story was, in fact, no big deal, and went back and posted the second breaking news story with the remark "This doesn't sound like a coincidence." Usually that smart-ass streak stands me in good stead. This morning wasn't one of those times.
I glared at my mail as it went out. "Dammit", I thought to myself. "Two planes hitting the World Trade Center is a big deal. Terrorists have targeted that building for years, and there could be dozens dead." CNN, with their need for mattress ads, was worthless, so I went out and tried a different channel.
The local FOX affiliate was carrying FAUX News Channel feed, and the instant I saw the scene, I knew it was a catastrophe of major proportions. Suddenly my whole world tilted.
The news feed showed the two buildings, smoking like spent Roman candles, while idiot announcers blathered. When I was finally able to redirect my focus from the incredible sight of the twin towers, I realized that the FAUX ninny had the director of FEMA on, and was asking him, "What could you have done to make the World Trade Center more secure?"
"You can't guard against maniacs flying planes into buildings" I thought. Just the fact that the buildings were standing was proof that they had been safeguarded against such an event about as well as is humanly possible. Looked like they were big honking planes, too.
I switched to CBS. Morning crew there, which meant that the "voice experts" were well-paid simpletons whose specialty consisted of throwing powder-puffs at celebrities out plugging the latest movie or book, interspersed with the sort of corporate "news lite" which is info-kibble for Americans. This would be way over their heads.
Then I saw something that I'll carry to my grave. They showed the replay of the second aircraft banking steeply around and striking Building One at about the 40th floor. It looked like a passenger jet, an A300 perhaps (I found out later it was a 757).
I've seen my share of big-budget thriller extravaganzas from Hollywood, the type where, say, if Nicholas Cage is in them, the critics use the word "slumming" a lot. Big plane hit building, go boom, all fall down, oh the shame. I've heard dozens of people say, "It was just like a movie" about that scene.
No. It was nothing like a movie. No movie ever produced the empty drop in the pit of my stomach the way that video clip did.
At that point, I woke my wife, and went back to tell everyone on the mailing list to turn on their televisions or start hitting the main news web sites online. I took a glance at my email (over a hundred new since I last checked it an hour earlier) and realized word was getting around.
One email caught my eye, a note from Gene Gaudette, publisher of American Political Journal. "Call me" it said, and gave a Manhattan number. Manhattan. Jeezus. I checked the time stamp, added three hours for left coast. It was after the plane crashes. I logged off and dialed the number.
On the fourth ring, I realized that I was never going to get through, that there were probably several tens of millions trying to call in to the island all at once to make sure friends, associates, loved ones were all ok. The line was weird and staticky, and the rings had curious little hitches to them. There wasn't a chance I would get through.
Gene answered on the fifth ring. Just six and a half miles from the World Trade Center, the incident had rung his bell pretty good. He has his own tales to tell, and he can tell them better than I can, so I'll settle for saying he assured me he was safe and located in a position where an attack seemed unlikely (by then we knew that the Pentagon and possibly Pittsburgh had been attacked). He asked where I was, and I said "Mt. Shasta", and he said, "Oh, you'll be fine then." True -- there's nothing of interest to terrorists here, but it didn't stop me from a quick crazed image of someone flying a 767 into the side of the volcano. I promised Gene to get some writing on the attack in as soon as possible -- a promise now keeping me up late -- hung up and came back out to the living room, shaking my head. Gene felt that the attack had claimed seven thousand lives. I thought he was being optimistic. Each tower held 25,000 people.
My wife was looking stunned, and pointed to the screen. "They say the top of one of the towers just fell to the street." I looked at the screen. I could see one tower, black smoke still pouring from the top. The camera angle was in line with the towers, meaning one was obscured by the other. I switched channels to a network that had their cameras positioned perpendicularly to the towers. I could still only see one tower.
We have a large-screen TV, one of those 36" CRT jobs. I had my nose about a foot from the glass, trying to figure out what I was seeing. "I still only see one tower. I don't see the other one at all. I think the whole goddamned thing just collapsed!"
I turned to my wife to follow her hand motions as she tried to describe what the announcer had said had happened. I turned back, just in time to see the replay, the corners of the tower giving a strange little shiver, and then the top peeling open, a ghastly grey chrysanthemum, then sinking vertically on itself, a vast mimicry of one of the early failed space shots from the dawn of the space age. A vast yellow gray blooming, the antithesis of life, and then there were no towers at all.
It wasn't a replay.
I looked again. The announcers were shouting incoherently. There was a light grey column of smoke, too thin to conceal a tower. Where the towers had stood was only sky. They were gone. The announcers were babbling, empty parrot excitement, about attacks to come and still-missing planes and Pearl Harbor, but all I felt was a bleak emptiness. Twenty thousand people? Fifty? I couldn't begin to guess how many were missing in the clouds of lathing and media excitement.
I didn't want to go to the office, but when a client is traveling all the way from the Bay Area to see you with an important job, there isn't much choice. I walked to the bus stop and ran into George, a garrulous, friendly old guy who likes to tell me was a bastard George W. is. "That bastard takes after his father" is still one of my favorite lines. It's our fault, George proclaimed. We let all these foreigners in, and this is how they repay us. Now Dub wants to let all the Mexicans in, and see what's happened?
I looked at George. "You think the Mexicans did this?" I asked. George scowled, the frown of an intelligent man who has just realized he's talking nonsense. He admitted he was angry in part because he didn't know who to blame.
I picked up the morning Sacramento Bee, knowing that it went to print hours before the attacks, and thus would be the most boring and out of date paper I ever read. The lead story was about a crazed security guard who had gone on a rampage and killed five people, gotten into a huge gun battle with CHP, and subsequently blown his brains out after shooting two cops. It didn't seem very important or interesting.
I live in a place where the bus drivers are friendly, and like to argue politics and baseball. Today, the driver was seething, talking about being so mad he wanted to quit his job, go to Kabul, and just open fire with a machine gun.
"Do you really think you'll hit anyone who had anything at all to do with the events of this morning?" I asked.
He didn't know. He just knew that we had starved our intelligence forces, and that was why they -- whoever "they" were -- were able to pull this off. He asked if it was true that all airlines were grounded, and I replied that it was, and again, the image of a plane flying into the mountain arose. "If you see anything in the air, it's either military or enemy". An odd feeling, that. This time the plane was black, with a white, five-pointed star on the side.
I had wondered about the airline hijacking angle myself. Whoever did the attacking had simultaneously hijacked four, maybe five commercial airliners, and had wired the towers to implode after the planes struck -- or so I thought at the time -- and were doing who knew what else even as we slid past the endless pine trees. How do you get past airport security and hijack five planes at once? True, security was something of a joke, minimum wage with a badge, but it should be able to spot at least one of those attempts. One would think.
I don't know why, but my clientele is top heavy with psychiatrists. They have a special affinity for me, and I don't know if it's because they find me a refreshing voice of sanity and reason, or if it's because they think I'm bull goose crazy and they need to keep an eye on me. "Mebbe dangerous." No point in asking any of them: I'll just get an enigmatic smile and be asked, "Which do you think it is, Zepp?" I shrug and hope for the best.
The first one, a nice retired guy, came by right on schedule. I knew that he had a TV, but it was strictly an adjunct to his VCR, which he used to watch movies and videos by Ickes and Greer. I envisioned him showing up with a gentle smile, totally oblivious to the day's events. It wasn't the sort of news I relished sharing with him.
I underestimated his interconnectedness. He does have a keen interest in the secular world, and he also has a telephone, and friends. What he wanted to know was if I had any images so he could see for himself. By then, the images weren't hard to find. He examined them soberly, asking occasional questions. If he was at all surprised, he gave no sign, and indeed, when I stopped to consider my own response, like a tongue probing a tooth cavity, I discovered that I felt some shock, but no surprise.
In a rational political world, the events of the day would mean an end to the idiocy of Star Wars. Of course, in a rational world, the idiocy known as Star Wars would not have come up in the first place. We'll probably end up keeping Star Wars and losing our ability to move about the country freely after all shakes out.
The second shrink, the one from San Francisco, showed up at eleven, fluttering and out of breath. Had she left just two hours later, she would have been stuck, because all the bridges in the Bay Area had been closed. I hadn't heard about the bridges closing, but it struck me as prudent.
My client seemed to think that it was a near death experience. I remember once getting caught in a city firestorm. The flames rushed down from the hills, feeding on Santana winds, and roared into the town, destroying entire neighborhoods. In my location, the fire jumped an ten-lane freeway and roared up a eucalyptus hill behind us like napalm in a Philippine jungle. We decided to be elsewhere, and loaded gear into trucks and sped off, me in one direction on a two lane road, a news reporter for a local radio station in another. I watched in my rear view mirror as the reporter sped under a blazing steel and creosote wood railroad trestle, and it broke loose and fell just as he was passing under it. A beam slapped his rear bumper, sending sparks and embers everywhere, and in my memory, his vehicle scootched its rear wheels under itself and escaped by inches. I imagine that after the fire, that reporter told bar acquaintances his tale in much the same way that the psychiatrist was telling me the story of her Escape from San Francisco.
Somehow, missing a bridge closure by two hours didn't seem to be on quite the same level. Then I realized that what she was doing was infusing the attacks into her reality, making it personal, making it a part of her life.
Making it real.
Like I'm doing by writing this.
For the rest of the day, I saw the same thing. People described things, usually trivial, that allowed them to share in it. "It made me late for work because I was watching it on TV when the South Tower came down". "I have a cousin in New Jersey who says he heard the crashes". "My dad was at Pearl Harbor. He says it was like this". "Someone told me to watch for National Guard passing through".
I changed my usual greeting for the day from "Howzit goin'?" to "Hell of a day, eh?". No point in pretending anything was normal.
I realized that the town was unusually quiet. Traffic was about half its normal volume in the streets. There weren't people walking around in the fresh autumn sunshine. When I stepped outside between clients for some air and light, I heard a raven fly by. That's common up where I live, unusual in the noisier downtown area.
At one point, the sky filled with smoke, and on any other day, people would be poking in to let me know what was burning, or to ask if I knew what was burning. In a pine forest in late summer, fire is taken very seriously. The smoke grew thick enough to obscure the mountain, and nobody asked about it.
After a while the clouds rolled in, rain fell, and the smoke went away. I never saw a fire go unmentioned the way this one did. I still don't know what was burned, despite running into a First Responder acquaintance on the way home.
I kept busy much of the day, with the radio in the background. NPR had dropped their Open Air music format and was giving a direct feed from the BBC. They were repeating the news cycle on a half hour basis, and I knew that the questions that mattered the most would not be answered on this first day. Who did it? How many victims?
Why?
By 3:30 my workload eased up, and I felt a surge of unreality as the memory of the morning events rushed in. With no pressing duties, I listened carefully to the news cycle on NPR, and was basically unsurprised to learn that little of import had occurred since the collapse of the second tower. About the only notable story was that right-wing commentator Barbara Olson, wife of Solicitor-General Ted Olson, had been on the plane that crashed at the Pentagon.
I won't insult anyone's intelligence by pretending that I have any regrets for the death of that particular woman.
But give the devil her due: as a wanna-be journalist, she died in the middle of a major story, risking her life to try and get word out to the world on what was happening.
She died well.
I had dozens of questions, and no answers. The planning that went into this operation was immense. The sheer audacity of hijacking at least four commercial jetliners at once was breathtaking; nobody had managed it successfully in the United States in over twenty years. Let alone four at once.
They took planes at the start of transcontinental flights, so as to assure a maximum fuel load. They had to get at least two terrorists on board each plane, one of which was competent to fly a Boeing 7X7 and navigate exactly with no help from ground control.
They timed it so the cameras would be rolling when the second flight hit the tower. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't calculate the consequences and realize that in the fairly immediate future, the buildings would collapse.
How is it possible that American security missed all that? I've heard Tom Clancy's whines about how intelligence has been starved since the days of Carter, but even he acknowledges that we do, in fact, have at least 800 spies. If Osama bin Laden was responsibile for this, why didn't it occur to us to use them to infiltrate the most dangerous group known to us?
Did we know something was coming, and how much did we know?
The London Guardian reported the day before the attack that the US government had just shut down 200 Moslem websites, citing national security concerns. As far as I know, the story appeared nowhere in the US media, but copies of it are widely available on the web.
The CIA was taken by surprise by the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite the fact that nearly everyone else saw it coming. Perhaps it's not surprising they totally missed the most audacious and complicated act of terrorism in history.
It may not be surprising, but it's inexcusable. American intelligence shares blame for what happened.
If it wasn't Osama bin Laden, then who? Saddam Hussein? Moammar Khadafi? If either, we need to remember actions we've taken against each in the past, and realize that not matter how righteous we felt at the time, perhaps killing Kadafi's toddler daughter or massacring 400,000 of Saddam's population has led to retribution.
To know that and to ignore it puts us at risk of being just another blood-stained quarreler in the endless bloody battles of that region.
During the course of the day, Putsch played a bizarre game of whack-a-mole, popping up in Sarasota, Florida, then Shreveport Louisiana, next Nebraska, and finally was addressing the nation from Washington. All the bouncing around was supposed to convince the nation that his life was of extreme importance, and that we should play such games to prevent the bogeymen from killing him. I assume that was why they did that. If the nation noticed at all, it was to ask, "where the hell is the President?"
So at five thirty PDT, they put him on for two minutes of Leadership, as it's envisioned by the junta. He rattled off two minutes of insipid babble, including such fatuous gems as, "America was targeted for this attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." He then droned the 23rd Psalm at us, and was whisked off to a sock drawer to await the next time America needed Leadership, Republican style.
When I got home, I found that my wife had found a CBC news feed on C-SPAN. She had gone channel surfing, looking for Putsch's speech (which was originally supposed to be at 6pm, but his handlers were still playing whack-a-mole with us) and found CBC instead.
CBC coverage was superb. We watched for about an hour. Canadians are anxious as well as concerned, since various anti-US terrorists had used Montreal as a base in the past, and the American government had been critical of Canada's relatively liberal border policies.
In my opinion, one problem the United States has with much of the rest of the world is that America has seen fit to interfere with the inner workings of other countries, often to the detriment of the people in those countries. The day before the attack, the pending court case against Henry Kissinger about his involvement in the Allende coup in Chile was in the news, and an ultimate example of nasty American meddling, Daniel Ortega, is in the news again, running for President. A lot of people resent America for this, and for the empty jargon about wealth and freedom. People don't resent America because it is rich and free; they resent America, too often with justification, because America has worked to keep them poor and subjugated. Many Moslem countries remember the various sabotages against their homes committed by America for the simple reason that they were allies of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the attack in New York was a residue from the Cold War.
I had heard from various folks that a large group of Palestinians had celebrated the attacks, and that MSNBC cameras had caught them. CBC showed the celebration, which turned out to be mostly kids about ten years old. CBC, interviewing a Palestinian leader, noted that it was "dangerous to taunt the Americans at this particular time". Palestinian leaders apologized for the incident, and said it did not reflect the views of the leadership. CBC, like most everyone else, had Osama bin Laden as their number one suspect.
I switched over to FAUX News Channel -- and got a shock. The network seems determined to whip the nation up into a war frenzy, and was obsessively showing the second plane collision intercut with the celebrating Palestinian children, with lots of flag-waving and evocations to national pride and strength.
Wars are good for ratings, and FAUX is probably hoping that we can attack somebody in the Middle East and kill thousands while remaining unscathed, as happened with Saddam Hussein. Then the inevitable counter-attack from terrorists would boost ratings even more.
If I thought FAUX represented America, I would consider rooting for the terrorists. They are that cynically manipulative and irresponsible. They are vicious and stupid , a snarl from under the rock, and represent the worst America has to offer.
There is a war fever sweeping the nation today, the day after the attack, and while I have no trouble understanding the urge for retribution, I'm worried that our leadership, such as it is, will simply stage a well-covered massacre of people who never had a thing to do with terrorists, and are guilty of nothing more than living in the same part of the world and not being blindly loyal to the United States.
At that point, we will be in the position of attacking and slaughtering thousands of innocents so we can show the world that we think the attacking and slaughtering of thousands of innocents is wrong. At that point, any difference that may have existed between Osama bin Laden and the United States vanishes altogether.
There is a name for retribution without justice.
It's called terrorism.
Copyright © 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.
